The Cannibal Lynx

The stories in The Cannibal Lynx were told to ethnographer Lawrence Millman by Labrador Innu (formerly Montagnais-Naskapi) elders in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They document a way of life in the subarctic bush that has now all but disappeared. In them, human beings and animals are of equal importance, so much so that they often marry each other. People who don’t respect animals don’t get any game and end up starving to death. Characters in the stories include monsters, cannibals, talking mosquitoes, horny leeches, giant penises, and stomping mammoths. Many of the stories are also quite scatological. Indeed, you could call them the Innu equivalent of dirty jokes. For example, “The Shit Man” concerns a man who’s very highly regarded, although he’s composed entirely of excrement. The elder who told Millman the story punctuated his telling of it with raucous laughter. Such laughter would have gone a long way to help the Innu get through the long, cold Labrador winter.   You might say “Not For Children” when considering these stories, except the Innu thought that children should no more be deprived of laughter than adults. The Cannibal Lynx, too, is a book for all readers except for those who want Native stories to be G-rated. 3